Talk:Aptitude

Average Aptitudes: Why.

Why does this table matter, and why would anyone care?

"Average" aptitude (as in, what all other aptitudes are compared to) is canonically 0 -- I don't see what benefit anyone could get from knowing that the mean Short Blades aptitude of all species currently in the game is 0.308. If you're playing the game, you're going to be looking at your species' aptitude for Short Blades, and judging whether you should use that nice rapier you found based on how your aptitude compares to 0, not how it compares to how good everything is at Short Blades in general.

Also, why include Gnolls? Their whole schtick is having arbitrarily-high aptitudes because they're forced to train all skills. --spudwalt (talk) 08:51, 13 September 2022 (CEST)

Well, for me at least, it's trivia like how "Kobolds were originally creatures from Germanic mythology" are. It's amusing for general data purposes, and close enough to Human where players won't really be mislead. There are also some species trends (high Hexes, boosted by stuff like Vp/Mu/Sp) which are somewhat useful for comparing spell schools in a game design sense (can't buff too much when...)

Also I assumed that Gnolls were included (largely for safety), and checking Modules:Aptitude doesn't disclude gnolls or anything. It's not like Gn are explicitly included, but an average didn't filter them out yet. --Hordes (talk) 08:59, 13 September 2022 (CEST)

Someone else had already written the function, and it seemed interesting to me for the reasons Hordes mentioned (I’d been curious about it even before seeing the function was there). Including Gnolls was just an oversight, I will fix that when I get a chance. I’m not attached to it though if you decide to delete Pisaster (talk) 09:26, 13 September 2022 (CEST)

I'm not opposed to having the function floating around in the wiki's code (it's probably a relic from when skill pages used to list averages), I'm more just wondering what purpose it serves hanging around on the main Aptitude page. --spudwalt (talk) 09:30, 13 September 2022 (CEST)